Yeah, these things happen.
I had the same bad luck with the original version of Ultima Underworld 2 on 3,5 inch Disk.
Fortunately I got the CD version of UU 1 + 2 as well 😊

And my original Wing Commander 2 reports an error during installation too. One disk seems to be damaged.

I have decided not to go for floppy disk versions any more.

yeah, cd's are way safer, but floppy games... they rule!!! 😊
I made images of all my floppy games, only uw1 was damaged...
I wonder if there is a place to download some disk images....

CD's won't last long either. We should institute a video games museum with copies in good conditions. That would take time and money. So, bummer!

Not quite sure if this is good enough for you, but there is a site with links to the demo version of Ulitma Underworld 1.
http://uwadv.sourceforge.net/index.php?page=download
Better than nothing...

(I remember playing this game from a CD released with an anniversary issue of Computer Gaming World with a bunch of other older games, Issue 200 I believe. If you have a friend who happens to have some of those old demo CDs and hopefully this specific one, you could always borrow it to play)

You may want to invest in Spinrite http://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm.

It is most likely possible to recover and relocate the data.

tried spinrite, but no luck.
in my experience, when a floppy is bad it is dead. I use HD-Copy 2.0a to make images and read/write. if sequential reading re-tries do not recover the data, there is no way to fix it... u can analyze all u want, the surface of the disk is dead... remember it is a floppy that costs cents, not a hard-drive that has more probability to fix because of it's higher surface quality...

Yep, that's right.

I wasn't sure you tried it.

When I encounter a disk with an error and it is recoverable I backup and throw away the floppy anyway. It is always just the beginning of more errors.

Well, sometimes you just need everything on the original disk. I had good luck with 3.5" old disks, that's 5.25" that were giving me problems. There are a few tricks that you should try before giving up.
- Use cleaning disk on your drive. Clean it a few times in a row, never hurts.
- "Massage" the floppy (just the casing, not the disk itself!) with your fingertips -- sometimes old floppies get stuck.
- Try different drive, preferrably, completely different model/manufacturer.
- Find some software that tries to read multiple times (or just hit retry all the time) and remove and re-insert floppy while it tries to read bad sector. Do it a few times -- I had quite a few cases when this trick allowed me to get data from seemingly hopeless location.
- Wash the disk -- disassemble the casing (yes, it's somewhat destructive operation) and carefully wash the disk itself with lukewarm water and a little soap. Reassemble the casing (use tape if needed but not glue) and try reading it. This is definitely not a recommended method in your case, the condition of the game will not be cosmetically good after it.
If all of those have failed the disk is definitely dead. In some cases you can restore disk image by replacing bad sector data with bits from some other copies -- hex editing skills are required. This is particularly possible if the disk in question contains a relatively common game.
I did not mention that some bad sectors on floppies may be related to copy protection. Somehow I never encountered copy protected 3.5" on PC although they were very common on other platforms. 5.25" is another story, about 30% of them have some copy protection.

I have had good luck in recovering some unreadable floppies with VGACOPY 6.2x > retries = 99

Thanks, I will give it a try with my Wing Commander II disk 5 😊

hm, this vgacopy looks nice, but I think HD-Copy offers more options... here, try it, runs OK on every pc, on every OS...

Thanks! I will give it a whirl. 😎

uh thanks for the tools, i have many good old games on floppy disks with read errors. in the past i used PC-TOOLS to repair the disks, but the file data was mostly lost. i hope this works better...

Hi folks,

time to bring some new life into this thread here:

Since yesterday I got my 3,5" version of Wing Commander II running again, after all these years.

Here is how I did it:
The installer claimed, that disk 5 is bad or damaged. None of the tools mentioned here worked in my case. And Win98 even suggested to format the unreadable disk in drive a: (!!!!)

Fortunately, I got a mac too. I connected a usb-floppydiskdrive to it, inserted the "bad" disk and - voila: All files were readable on the mac! I copied them onto the macs HDD and from there back onto a new 3,5" disk. Twenty minutes later I sat back and enjoyed the opener of WCII.
Life can be so wonderful!

One note for others:
During copying the files back from the mac onto a 3,5" disk, I was told that there wasnt enough space on it. Took some time for me to figure out, that the MAC OS was written two or three invisible files onto that disk as well!
Um, so I splitted the files onto two diks, transported them to the PC in a new folder. There I deleted the now visible mac-files and after that procedure I was able to copy ALL the files onto ONE single 3.5" disk.

nagra

Did you also try that USB floppydrive on a PC with the "bad" disk?

My win98 PC needs a driver for that device. I dont have one.

But it is a good chance that it was the device itself that made the difference, not the machine.